


Et in Arcadia ego

by notbecauseofvictories



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 20:30:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5942029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/pseuds/notbecauseofvictories
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>when he asks her to come with him to the outer rim of space, she does</p>
            </blockquote>





	Et in Arcadia ego

**five.**

His skin is smooth and warm, giving under her hands the way the desert never did. She likes marring it, raising welts with her nails on his back (she is a feral girl, sand-born and greedy) and he laughs; low, breathless. His lips fit to hers perfectly.

Somewhere beyond the stars, worlds and worlds away, there is war and there is death but she is happy. She has chosen.

 

**two.**

They run until there is no more universe to run with, hitching rides between planets and systems in exchange for labor. Finn is strong, and follows orders well—they all comment on it, the stinking captains and dirty smugglers who offer them passage—and Rey knows ships like she can hear the power couplings and drive locks whispering to her. They scrape by. They make due. Rey feeds him badly-mixed portions with her fingers, giggling, and he kisses her electrical burns, and at some point, she will stop thinking about Han Solo saying, _There’s a place for you, if you want it—_

They run until the Sabrixin system, to a nowhere planet called Elokas, because Rey steps off the ship and almost drops the crate she’s carrying.

_Oh,_ she says, staring at rolling hills, the fields of waving grass and more sky than can fit inside her. (She still isn’t used to the sight of so much green, a warmth that eases under her skin instead of trying to strip her of softness.) _Oh_ , she says. And, _Here._

When she looks back, Finn is smiling at her. _Yeah,_ he says, and there’s something wonderful about the way he says it, like a dam breaking—all that something-wonderful flooding out, all at once. (Rey feels herself blush, and looks away.)

_Yeah, here_.

 

**six.**

There was that occasional mention in the market of a new power in the galaxy, an organization that called itself the First Order—they had destroyed the Capitol, some said, as the Death Star once did Alderaan. They had decimated the secret base of the Resistance, others claimed, and were on the hunt for myths:  _Luke Skywalker,_ the living god, as though to add deicide to their crimes.

_Not something we need worry about,_ was the consensus in the market. Whatever this First Order was, whatever it represented, it wouldn’t come to this backward, out-of-the-way world at the edge of the known universe. Nothing here but dust and sky, an incidental mining colony, a handful of people scraping by on petty crimes and backbreaking work. Nothing here to interest a would-be Empire

Look at Rey and Finn, they said—those young lovers, wandering between the stalls and laughing, hand in hand. Who would think to wish them harm?

 

**eight.**

In the end, the sky opens up and swallows her whole. There is no foreshadowing. (There is foreshadowing, whispers that the Jedi-killer seeks a new target. Rumors that he scours the galaxy for this last relic, this final obstacle in the path of the First Order. But why would anyone think that Rey—desert-born Rey, who knows when the sun will flare and ships like she can hear them whispering to her—-was anything more than touched with luck?)

Finn can see the fire from the cantina, and breaks out in a run halfway down the street, screaming into the dust kicked up by the strange black command shuttle.

It does not heed him. The flowers tacked to the plaster of their home burn, sweet.

 

**three.**

She takes odd jobs around town, fixing comm units and chronos, occasionally summoned by the overseer of the mine to look at their terminals, and troubleshoot the holonet. (This far from civilization, transmitting any actual data mostly relies on hope, and careful timing between the solar flares.

Rey is eerily good at anticipating solar flares. When asked, she shrugs, pins it on luck.)

Finn tends bar at the local cantina. The regulars like him for _just_ overfilling their glass, and making warm, easy conversation—he likes knowing their faces, plain and weathered as old duracrete, the way they sigh and settle into their stools at the bar. He likes being known, called by name, asked for _the usual;_  those who know him well asking after _that pretty girl of yours._ He is vague when they want to know where he came from, but they let it lie—he is not the first soldier to flee to edges of the universe looking for peace.

Rey walks him home each night, to the little house at the end of the last dirt road. It is theirs, always filled with bits of junk and scraps of machinery, datapad humming softly to keep Finn’s page in whatever he was reading. _Home_ is a word that fits badly in both their mouths, so they content themselves with oblique references— _ours_ , and _The House_ , and flowers, dried in the sun and pinned to the peeling plaster walls.

(Finn’s handwriting beside them, listing types: _bachani flower,_ and _star-mist_ , and _I love you,_ written and scribbled out, half a dozen times.)

 

**seven.**

The dreams of the green island in the blue sea have gone, slipped away—instead, Rey dreams of a beautiful woman cast from durasteel, who wears sorrow like a mantle, who watches all she loves turn to ash and still cannot die.

_Rey,_ the woman says, as the fire of the sun engulfs her. _Rey, why did you run. Rey why did you abandon us. We were waiting, Rey. We were waiting—_

The woman burns, and Rey is left standing there, her arms full of arallute. But the blooms are rotting, too-sweet, and it it wrong, it is all wrong.

 

**nine.**

_You are my guest,_ Kylo Ren says, but there are too many teeth in his smile, too much hunger inscribed on the planes of his face. Rey feels no pity for him, the greasy twine of his hair, dried blood still beneath his nails. He looks like a madman, gone on spice, and it is wrong, it is _wrong,_ she is afraid.

(There is no Han Solo to come for her, not anymore. When he tries, Finn will be shot on sight, the holovid footage played as General Hux crows about the death of traitors, and order, always order. But first—)

_I too am an orphan in the world,_ Kylo Ren says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear with an awful gentleness. Her stomach roils. _It is strange how easily gods and heroes die, when they are of your own flesh._

Rey shuts her eyes, and turns away.

 

**four.**

_Don’t ever go where I can’t follow,_ Rey says as Finn settles beside her. (It was the first time she had ever come under his hands, and he had laughed _Rey, oh, Rey_ against her slack mouth.) Her voice breaks on the last word, and she hides her face in the crook of his neck, breathing in the sour-sweat smell of him.

_I know,_ Finn murmurs, which is not quite a promise but is something like, whispered like that against her skin. _I know._

 

**one.**

_Rey,_ Finn says, and his hand is warm where it cradles hers, gentle, like her wrist is something precious and finely-wrought, a treasure scooped up from the sand, polished by his hand, his hand there. _Rey, come with me._

Every breath and atom and inch of her skin is screaming to stay, to go with Han, the Resistance—

But no one has ever asked her to _come with_. She is abandoned property, a thing left waiting; her choices were always to stay or to go. She hadn’t realized there was this too, this beautiful boy with his fingers at her wrist, offering a third option, saying _go with me._

She chooses.

 

**ten.**

(She does not know this, but Jedi do not get to choose. They do not get to be happy. The Force cares only about balance, clawing its way back to equilibrium, and for everything given, it swallows stars whole.

The Force is merciless, jealous of its Skywalkers. A pity it killed everyone who might have taught her so.)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [dent-de-lioun](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14061945) by [handschuhmaus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus)




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